It has to be said that isolation has bread some fairly impressive creativity in the last month or so. Not being able to live life as we usually do, a lot of people are finding inventive ways to use the internet to connect with friends, see the outside world, or just as a creative outlet. A bunch of stunt people have done all of the above via a new viral (are we still calling these things viral?) video that shows a collection of individual stunt people using the magic of the internet to virtually beat the hell out of each other, check it out.
The video was posted on the twitter account of Campus Univers Cascades, a French school dedicated to teaching stunt people. One assumes classes for that are as cancelled as school is everywhere. I would think doing distance learning with stunts is close to impossible, though this is a pretty fun attempt to do that.
The video itself is pretty simple, one stunt person punches or kicks the camera, the next falls backward as if they'd be struck, and then they follow up with a shot of their own. Rinse, repeat. Still, it's a lot of fun as we see the stunt people all throwing themselves into things, or doing particularly athletic punches and kicks. One guys even throws himself into a brerakaway table, another tag team with a toddler to kick somebody in the face.
It's a great little video that shows the fun you can still have even when self-isolating. It's also a great advertisement for the stunt school, which I wasn't even aware was a place that existed. Though, I suppose you need to be able to learn how to be a stunt person somewhere.
And the video also does remind us just how great out movie and TV stunt people are. By design, we never see their faces but we see their work all the time even though they get little credit for it. We're specifically not supposed to know when we see them on screen and we usually only learn their names if something bad happens on set. We've seen stunt people get seriously injured or lose their lives in recent years, which shows just how dangerous the profession truly is, even with modern safety precautions.
Over the years there have been numerous movements to try and get stunt people their own Academy Award. It's still more than a little bizarre that something like that hasn't happened yet.
Hopefully, by the time one of these young students graduates from school, the stunt profession will be in a better place. Maybe one of them is the next big movie star, we just don't know it yet. Of course, with film productions all closed down, stunt people are in a potentially tough position. They don't get paid like the movie stars they pretend to be, so not working can be a potentially serious issue.
